BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2016: Elizabeth Jennings Graham stood up for her right to public transportation in NYC way back in 1854

By Anita M. Samuel

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Feb 11, 2016 | 4:00 AM

Elizabeth Jennings Graham defeated streetcar segregation in New York 100 years before Rosa Park made history by refusing to give up her seat on a bus.

More than a century before Rosa Parks' actions sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, New York teacher and church organist Elizabeth Jennings Graham had already helped to desegregate public transportation in New York City when she denied requests to leave a streetcar and was forcibly removed.

With the help of her father, successful businessman Thomas Jennings, and other high-ranking African-Americans, Graham and the 1854 incident became the catalyst for ending racial discrimination on the streetcars, which were horse-drawn, privately run and mostly segregated at the time.

Graham sued the private Brooklyn-based Third Avenue Railroad Company, the conductor and the driver — and won in 1855, thanks to a novice attorney named Chester A. Arthur, who went on to become the 21st President in 1881. After several similar challenges, all public transportation was desegregated in New York by 1865.

Street cars in 1854 were horse-drawn, privately run and mostly segregated. (Petrella, Joe)

Graham's father — a lower Manhattan tailor, activist and inventor — was the first African-American to receive a U.S. patent. His invention was a clothes cleaning process called "dry scouring," the chemical removal of stains that was an early form of dry cleaning.